Rural America could bust monopolies tomorrow if they voted differently. They've done it before, and they don't need to be rescued by us for that. More like they need to rescue themselves and the rest of us.
Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
151–160 of 353 posts
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ds talk a better game, but they rarely walk that talk. Take just your first example. W's first year in office, he wanted to standardize "civil unions" that would have entailed all the same rights as "traditional marriages". Of course, lots of "conservatives" were against that, so W reached across the aisle. Crickets. Ds decided they wanted to preserve that issue's political value, so it was more than a decade before…
What's your point in your false equivalency? Are you implying that the 20 million people that now have medical coverage because of Democrats pushing for Obamacare isn't worth it? Was that all "talk"? I'm seriously trying to understand your "equivalency" position. Let me know what the Republicans would have done for health care? Right now it seems that the only thing they've done is to actually limit universal health…
I don't believe 20M more people have medical coverage because of Obamacare, that's a lagging indicator that's likely dead wrong. If you are self employed it made medical insurance unaffordable. Before Obamacare I paid $400 a month for a $5k deductible plan for my family. Post Obamacare I paid $1,100/month, then $1,400/month and quit when it went to $1,800 a month.
So my family has no long term medical insurance and no one is counting our dropping medical insurance in any statistic.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
20M on Obamacare != 20M who have health insurance because of Obamacare. Stop parroting CNN talking points and do your own research.
I don't find that a very enlightening point, but I will offer some real numbers. The widely cited 20 million is from the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan organization, not CNN, as you state [1]. And even if you chose to reject that, the number of health insurance policies purchased on exchanges in 2016 was 12.7 million and is expected to top 13 million this year, not an insignificant amount and not includi…
Obamacare made private medical insurance illegal, so millions of self employed lost coverage from that.
The exchange policies have increased in cost so rapidly they are unaffordable for anyone not getting a massive subsidies. Many self employed are now without insurance because of that.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
AHCA, Obamacare is definitely better than before, it guarantees open access to many who didn't have it before. A good thing. But it didn't go far enough. It played in to the corporate healthcare system demands by not offering a competitive public option. The so called Blue Dog democrats blocked that, which is such a shame. Far better than anything the Republicans have put on the table. The problem is that we basicall…
I completely agree. I was just pointing out to the poster I was replying to that with regards to one of the most important economic issues the US currently faces, there are meaningful differences between the two parties, despite the fact that they are both backed by mostly the same corporate interests. I'm tired of the "both parties are the same" trope. Current events clearly contradict that.
Isn't it obvious that it's a matter of perspective? Ask two non-programmers the difference between Python and Haskell, and they'll say, "They look the same to me." Ask two programmers the difference between Python and Haskell, and it's a fair bet that they'd be able to list off a laundry list of differences. Both perspectives are actually right, and neither one is a "trope" as you put it.
What you think of as meaningful differences someone else might think of as nominal differences.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#155Multiple other comments in here about this particular niche that the subject of the story went into (medical supplies), but what came to mind to me was a similar story about how it's a similar situation with the golf ball market [1] and from many other stories with eyeglasses (Luxottica artificially dominates the market). These are both cases where it's not so much anti-merger/monopoly law that's the culprit, but the…
Patents are government monopolies created to incentivize inventors to share their inventions so others could build upon them. The fear was they'd hide their IP behind factory walls and innovation would be slow.
Now patents are used by those who don't make anything and often don't even invent anything in order to blackmail those who do.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you know? Just because it's never been truly tested in reality doesn't mean we can't stop and think about the situation. We know what corporations do when they are given a choice (they choose profits over anything else) and we know that consumers will choose low prices over everything else as well. So, it's not hard to draw the conclusion that this will result in consolidation, economies of scale, and event…
Where has economies of scale hurt? ISPs are a special case because regulations make it difficult or impossible for competitors to run cable. But economies of scale turned cars, PCs, consumer electronics, air travel, etc, from rich peoples play toys into affordable products for the masses. As consolidation hit all those industries their products merely got cheaper and in most cases, far better.
Walmart. Walmart has destroyed thousands of businesses. Now you can argue the consumer got lower prices, but low prices don't matter when no one has money to afford them. Additionally, those economies of scale produced cheap, disposable, polluting goods that have an engineered lifetime so that customers have to keep buying the same appliance (or whatever) over and over.
The question isn't when economies of scale hurt, that's a loaded question. The question is "when does consolidation no longer benefit the consumer?". I would argue many, many industries have reached this point, with ISPs being the most obvious one, but there are many examples (like the syringe one given above) where a business you've never heard of silently corners the market through consolidation and trust building.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were powerful monopolies in the late 19th and early 20th century like U.S. Steel and Standard Oil that the government broke up.
Always found it interesting that the middle class in the US grew immensely wealthier during the period US Steel and Standard Oil were "monopolies".
How do you figure? Most historians credit the rise of the middle class to the post-war boom in the 50s. Standard Oil and US Steel were broken up during the Roosevelt and Taft administrations in the early 20th century.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the GP, but these are social issues largely, and while I care about them, I consider them less important than economic issues (for a multitude of reasons). And on economic/business issues, the two parties seems to have minimal differences.
Health care is squarely an economic/business issue that affects nearly everybody, and there are clear, meaningful differences between the two parties here.
I continually heard some years back that Obamacare was basically Romneycare which was basically the Republican plan from the Clinton years. Further, as we can see from the current state of things, the Republicans might say they hate Obamacare, but now that they have a chance to repeal it and put their own plan in place, they've failed continually. There's no politically-tenable position to move further rightward unless you are in favor of less people having care or people having worse care.
In short, the Democrats basically adopted the old Republican position on the only economic issue listed by the OP - exactly in line with my earlier point.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree. I was just pointing out to the poster I was replying to that with regards to one of the most important economic issues the US currently faces, there are meaningful differences between the two parties, despite the fact that they are both backed by mostly the same corporate interests. I'm tired of the "both parties are the same" trope. Current events clearly contradict that.
Isn't it obvious that it's a matter of perspective? Ask two non-programmers the difference between Python and Haskell, and they'll say, "They look the same to me." Ask two programmers the difference between Python and Haskell, and it's a fair bet that they'd be able to list off a laundry list of differences. Both perspectives are actually right, and neither one is a "trope" as you put it. What you think of as meaning…
The differences between Python and Haskell only affect programmers and people who employ programmers. The difference between the two parties approach to health care affects everybody in the US. It's not simply a matter of perspective.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it obvious that it's a matter of perspective? Ask two non-programmers the difference between Python and Haskell, and they'll say, "They look the same to me." Ask two programmers the difference between Python and Haskell, and it's a fair bet that they'd be able to list off a laundry list of differences. Both perspectives are actually right, and neither one is a "trope" as you put it. What you think of as meaning…
The differences between Python and Haskell only affect programmers and people who employ programmers. The difference between the two parties approach to health care affects everybody in the US. It's not simply a matter of perspective.
My point is that you see a large impact between the parties while others might see a low impact between the parties. That is a difference of perspective.